Saturday, July 31, 2010

Normal service will be resumed...

The photo above is Shirley at Chatham Maritime, taken yesterday when we went out for lunch with the kids and my Mum.

As you may have noticed, the Maggot Sandwich has been undergoing a bit of a hiatus over the last couple of weeks; this is not because of any lack of content, or will to post it online. The blame lies squarely on the shoulders of British Telecom and their dishonest and incompetent lackeys. My broadband failed at some time on the afternoon of the 19th of July; subsequently I have spent an average of an hour a day on the phone to the BT call centre in Bangalore, repeatedly explaining what the cause of the problem is. I have had an engineer booked to visit Pewty Acres who did not turn up, but logged that the job was complete, but no work was carried out. I subsequently had a phone engineer turn up and change my phone / broadband termination point to one whose socket was incompatible with my hard wiring (ironically previously installed by BT). The problem is not in my house at all, it is at the exchange end. I have discovered that the Slade Green phone exchange is being upgraded to fibre optic technology; in so doing, BT were aware that a small number of clients who had hard wired ADSL connections which had no micro filters (that is, people like me who have had broad band since it first came out, prior to the self install technology) would have their service fail. Rather than notify these customers, BT did nothing. The fault lies at the exchange. I have now been without any internet connection at home for nearly two weeks; another engineer is booked to visit me next Tuesday afternoon. He won't rectify the problem, as there is no fault at my end (other than the incorrect termination socket the other engineer installed last Thursday - which the new guy can change back). I get the feeling that it is going to be at least another week before I get my internet connection back online. As well as meaning the Maggot Sandwich has been interrupted, I have been unable to work from home in the evenings as per my special arrangement with work. This has had the unintended consequence that I have not been able to visit my Dad in his nursing home as regularly as usual. Suffice to say I am extremely unhappy with British Telecom. My spleen will be vented in full in the near future. Thanks to Mum and her brand new iMac, I have been able to get online to upload some new photos onto my Flickr account here, and provide the minimal update that you are now reading.

1 comment:

I also had ADSL put in by a BT engineer way back in 2001 and my exchange (Thamesmead) has been converted to fibre - in fact I now have a fibre connection. But I've not had any interruption to service or notice that I would be interrupted.

I fear you are being told a cock and bull story. Hope it gets fixed soon. Being without the net is a bit like having your water supply fail these days.